Nice parallel with mountaineering!! I do both: innovation and mountaineering and have used the same parallel when explaining the roles of risk, ambiguity, uncertainty and the relevance of planning for dealing and managing their souces.
There are other interesting things: most times you climb with a goal in mind (the summit) but without actually seeing it, and not knowing how close you are. Everest, for example...you only see the South Summit, and that can be dangerously deceiving. Similar things happen when a team gets anchor in a particular idea. Camaraderie in its extreme form, the lack of medals or heroes, etc.
One of the masters used to say that the worst danger in the mountain lies on the fact that men forgot what is like to live in total freedom. Similar things happen when we are designing, and canont get rid of our experiences, mental models, etc.
Just came back from Nepal two weeks ago...it was indeed priceless :)

Innovating upon something already in existence requires change. The road to that change can be faster or slower, but there's always a journey to be had. If you're lucky, it may be an easy path you take, but it's much more likely to be one with lots of obstacles, dips, and dead ends along the w...